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[ktch]

@Giaddon: I've heard about Miasmata but haven't tried it yet. The navigation system sounds interesting. Thanks for the suggestion!
@Whiteclaws: well, pretty close at least in terms of latitude

Been working on this small night/autumn scene for a couple of days now and I think I might finish it and call it Place 2 (place 1 being the one I linked in the first post).

How well do these screenshots read btw? They are pretty dark on my other monitor so I think I might have to increase the brightness a bit. It's not quite so dark in-game though when in fullscreen and looking around.

[herror]

I love this last screenshots 
Any chance that you post a higher res version of them?

[ktch]

Thanks!

I've been working on Place 2 and it's getting to a point where the changes and tweaks don't seem to be making any real difference anymore... so it's probably time to call it done and move on.

Here it is: http://jlv.sdf.org/pub/p/places/Place2-win32.zip

Let me know what you think!

[Whiteclaws]

Did i say it looked gorgeous?

plz plz slender 2.0

[Snow]

Those images feel far more real than any high tech 3d demo or rendering I have ever seen. I grew up in northern Alberta and basically lived out in the woods, so when I saw those pics, it instantly rekindled that feeling that I've missed for a very long time (and miss on a daily basis). If you had that on Oculus rift with 3d stereo sound, that would be incredible.

[ktch]

@Whiteclasw: thanks, cool shot 

@Snow: trying to take a bit of impressionistic approach where the presentation might be pretty rough but still manages to capture the essence of a particular place/mood. That is what I like in paintings and drawings as well. Oculus and VR in general is something I've been very excited about, so would definitely want to experiment with that.

[eobet]

Wow, you've really nailed the atmosphere and colors in those gifs!

When I actually played the demo, I was slightly disappointed because nothing was anti-aliased which made it feel... well, not as "clean" or stylized as it could be. I also noticed some weird things with mip-mapping (or lack of) in, for example, the shorter, dark flowers which appeared to float in the air from a distance, only to have their stems appear up close.

Still, it looks great and I'm looking forward to see it developed further.

[Panurge]

Yes, this is outright lovely. I really like your idea of having a long journey to accomplish and being able to plan your route as you like. Too much in the way of interactivity (esp combat) would spoil it but it would certainly be nice to have a goal towards which the player is heading. Perhaps some sort of pilgrimage? Anyway, beautiful work.

[FK in the Coffee]

This looks absolutely lovely, but when I tried booting up the demo, it gave me the error "failed to link shader program"
do you know why that is?

[ktch]

@eobet: I agree the aliasing is sometimes a bit jarring. I think the first thing is to just increase the texture resolution which I'm being way too conservative with in a scene like this (I think you could have packed everything in there in a single 512x512 texture). The low resulution combined with alpha testing causes stair stepping near the edges. Some of it could most likely be be worked around when designing and painting the textures. This will hopefully improve as I get more practice with it. Also, it's probably impossible to get very crisp textures when I'm just rendering huge flat polys with a single texture streched across them . For pixel level aliasing, I need to look into some AA algorithms (e.g. FXAA or similar) at some point. There's SSAA support right now but it's disabled for being just too expensive (maybe I could make it a toggleable option...).

I was planning on improving the mip-mapping before Place 2 but that fell by the wayside. It's a pretty high priority task though.

@Gabriel Verdon: thanks, I live in Finland myself and much of the inspiration is drawn from local scenery.

@Panurge: Yep, I'd like to keep it as simple as possible. Just you making your way to a destination.

@ThePortalGuru: I updated the build with better error diagnostics. If it's not too much trouble, could you download and try again and PM me the error message and e.g. which OS and graphics card you're using?

[ktch]

Did some experiments with more surreal color schemes. Ideally I'd like to be able to take a painting and pretty quickly turn it into a 3d scene. The scene below is the result of some cut and paste with the lasso tool and took about 45 mins including the rough concept. It's pretty far off from where I'd like it to be. Also, the work process somehow feels stiff and wrong... it'd be nice to just somehow paint the assets in-game...

I also tried to adding some blending to plant rendering after reading the Wolfire blog. The idea is to first render with alpha test enabled and then do a second pass with alpha blend enabled and depth write disabled. Very simple to implement with just a few lines of code changes.

Here's a blend on/off gif from Place 2:

And a closeup with no blend, blend enabled and then blend with alpha * 2:

Other misc. things:
- Made a texture atlas packer and mipmap generator tool (nvidia texture tools). Didn't notice any real difference in mipmap quality vs. automatic OpenGL mipmap generation (maybe I understood something wrong in http://the-witness.net/news/2010/09/computing-alpha-mipmaps/ ...)
- Working on breaking the world into streamable chunks

[Netsu]

The blending is amazing, makes it look even more painterly. Really loving where this is going.

[ktch]

Yeah, it does make things a little less digital looking . Unfortunately the current brute force implementation is pretty expensive, so I need to figure out how to speed it up before it's usable.

Here's an old concept for Place 1 that is a lot more "soft" than what the end result is. This is sort of the direction that I want to go towards. Maybe it's largely a matter of playing with the blending and fog and being careful with color value and hue.

[sakuyo]

wow, this is kicking some nostalgia/childhood buttons pretty hard. i'd be happy to just wander around in these environments for hours.

[Snow]

I don't even know how to put this into words.. the English language is too primitive. I think this is the first time that (to me anyways) an art medium is crossing the line into realism. But it's more like representative of realism. A painting that is not just a painting - a picture that you look at, but actually brings you into its world and bridges an unseen gap. The violin did this with music. I was told by a violin maker/repairer that it is the only instrument closest to the human voice.

I'll be a fan of Py for a very very long time.

[laxwolf]

I need this game in my life.

[ktch]

Thanks for the encouraging words everyone!

Here's a sunny summer scene I wanted to try a couple of days ago. First some warm up paintings and then in game:

Well... I actually prefer rainy and stormy weather. It's also more suitable for the engine as you can lower the draw distance and the fog helps to blend things together.

One of the bottlenecks that I most often run into is gpu fill rate. This is especially bad when there are a lot of tall trees in front of the camera (multiple near full screen quads). So to test things, I made a little tool that allows me to trim out the transparent areas from textures. It can make a significant difference, sometimes even more than doubling rendering speed (say for example from 30+ms to <16ms per frame). The below screenshot has the normal clipping rectangle overlaid to demonstrate the unused transparent areas that it pulls in (and it can sometimes be much worse). I added this as an optional optimization step in addition to the default clipping rectangle method.

One of the other problems I tried to solve are the dark halos around alpha tested textures. This seems to happen when the source texture has it's transparent pixels filled with black (e.g. 0x00000000 instead of 0x00ffffff) and bilinear texture filtering is used. The filtering samples black outside the visible pixels and mixes that with what ever color the visible pixels have. The only solution I know of is to fill the transparent pixels with something else than black, preferably a color similar to the visible pixels.

Turns out there's a plugin for Photoshop that does exactly that: Flaming Pears 'Solidify'. Unfortunately I don't have photoshop as I mostly work on Linux. Gimp has a similar plugin, http://www.gimpchat.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=3153, but it's so slow it's unusable for my purposes (was running for 15 minutes on a 2k texture at which point I killed it). For small textures the results are excellent though:

Any ideas how to achieve a similar result? Maybe I just need to get Photoshop and try the plugin...

[Farbs]

This is looking pretty great. Is it a custom engine or are you using something off the shelf?

I'm also curious about your fog setup. It looks a bit like linear fog set off a way into the distance, which doesn't do much to tie your scene together. With 0 inner fog distance and a nice curve you can really show a lot of depth in a scene.

Engine choice also helps figure out if you can do FXAA, which I believe is quite cheap and would certainly help a lot.

Anyway, am keen to see where this gets to. Have you studied garden design, for ideas about wandering branching paths, portals, reveals, vistas etc? I have no idea how or where you could actually learn about this stuff but I'm certainly curious about it.

[ktch]

Yeah it’s a custom simplistic OpenGL based engine. My original idea was to keep the tech and workflow very simple, i.e. just flat polygons, and push the 2d art instead. It’s somewhat of a slippery slope though, as the more you do that the more the technical limitations start to show.

The fog is exponential and was very haphazardly tuned for that summer scene.

I hadn’t really thought about this from a garden design stand point but there are definitely similarities!

[Colon Semicolon]

do you have intentions to add rivers and possibly old buildings like shacks/barns? if you did this would probably be my favorite thing ever. I've always wanted to make a sort of 'rainy walk simulator' sort of thing but I was never sure where to start. this though... this is actually pretty close to what I was envisioning (sans the city scenes I wanted to do anyway)